Standing up for our Constitutional Principles

Author’s Note: The following text was delivered at a rally in defense of the Tenth Amendment, held at the statehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on March 16, 2009 and organized by Representative Samuel Rohrer. The rally was well attended and the hundreds of people who crowded the rotunda, and who were shown on TV, carried such signs as â€œGive Us Back States Rights!â€ and â€œGuns and Property.â€

Never has this author seen such an exuberant outpouring of what has been described as the â€œAlternative Right.â€ These were the members of the true conservative movement, who would never be invited on to FOX news or asked to write for National Review or the New York Times. In short, they are the real Right, which the media have worked energetically to keep out of view. May their number increase!

It might seem to some that our gathering today looks like an exercise in futility. Why should we bother to pay honor to an amendment that our courts, legislatures, and public administrators usually ignore or treat as mere decorative language?

And why bother to remind the states, which now beg for federal grants and which run to conform to federal mandates, that the states under our founding document share with the federal branches a real right to govern? Certainly most of our states, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania included, have no desire to take back those â€œpowers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited to the States,â€ because, put most plainly, our states have become cringingly subservient to Washington.

I for one would be delighted if there were a level of government which would be willing to stand in the way of the expansion of federal power. That of course assumes that our states and their people still believed in our original constitutional principles.

As it turns out, however, the Founders did not indicate any level of government except for the states, as a partner in their plan for shared sovereignty. Whether we like it or not, it is the states, as indicated in the Tenth Amendment and in the original articles of the Constitution, with which the federal executive and federal legislative are meant to co-govern.

Therefore, those who of us shudder with horror at todayâ€™s centralized public administration need the states as the only constitutionally authorized bulwark against the consolidation of federal control. Even if most voters donâ€™t care about this centralization, those of us who do have a duty to call attention to those limits placed on federal power under our Constitution.

Needless to say, if those limits were fully abolished, most of my fellow-academics would be rejoicing in the streets, providing that those like themselves were running the show. A constitution that allows progressive intellectuals to socialize the rest of us from a single center of power is one that they would surely welcome.

But this development would occur against everything the founders believed would result from their project in self-government. They assumed that the influence of the state governments would remain stronger than that of the central regime.

Since the existence of the national government originally depended on state legislatures, to elect presidents and senators, and since â€œthe powers of the national government are few and defined,â€ as explained in Federalist 45, the Constitutionâ€™s authors believed that Americans would look first to the states in order to protect the â€œlives, liberty, and property of the people.â€

Clearly these constitutional architects did not foresee a time when states would become the mere creatures of federal power. Nor did they imagine that it would someday be necessary to push state governments into requesting the return of their original right to self-government. Least of all, could they have dreamt that American citizens would be gathering at some future time to insist that the states act like independent agents in relation to a federal bureaucracy that has no constitutional standing whatever.

It is doubtful that our being here today will get things back to where they should be. But it can serve as a reminder that weâ€™ve noticed how badly our constitution has strayed. This has occurred with the tacit approval of a shamefully passive or indifferent public. It has further involved a political class that, with some exceptions, such as those who invited me here to speak, is all too eager to take charge of our lives and liberty. It is also the class that continues to help themselves to our property, the very institution that, according to the founders, American citizens would look to the states to protect.

Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient. He is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a contributor to Taki’s Magazine, LewRockwell.com and many other websites.Â He is the author of eight books, with his most recent being Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007)

13 thoughts on “Standing up for our Constitutional Principles”

This was an excellent speech. Thomas Jefferson acknowledged the Tenth Amendment as being the cornerstone of the Constitution. All of us who believe in limited, constitutional government should agree. And then, let us follow up our belief with action.

The Constitution is not an esoteric curio of history locked in a glass case. Neither is it a “policy statement” to be used as a guideline for good government. It is LAW. Those officials who swear to uphold it and then immediately abrogate it are LAWBREAKERS as sure as a thief or gunman are lawbreakers.

We have thousands of unconstitutional laws,agencies, and activities. These include Departments of Education, HHS, FEMA, Labor, Energy, FICA. Now we have federal officials pouring money over their Wall Street friends and dictating salaries in private companies.

Why are we not seeing lawsuits challenging the legality of these activities? None of them are even mentioned in the Constitution and are therefore left to the states per the tenth amendment. An effective patriotic opposition party would and should be leading such legal challenges to make these traitors defend their activities and to force the Court to either condemn them or openly blaspheme the supreme law of the land.

Mr. Gottfried you said a mouthfull when verbaly pointing your finger at a “shamefully passive and indifferent public”! THIS is where our country’s problem lies in that the MAJORITY of people who DO vote don’t really know anything about the people they put into office other than what our “controlled” major media tells them! Those that take the time to explore and find truth and cast an educated vote are far outnumbered. The people in this country have been purposly dumbed-down, ever so gradually, through Marxist infiltration of our educational system, Hollywood and Television productions, to the point of placing SEX, BOOZE & SPORTS as their highest priorities! I am at the point of exasperation in trying to get people to even sign a simple petition here in Florida directed at our General Assembly for Affirmation of States Rights! It seems to me that we have an awful lot of people who are “frightened & intimidated” by the Federal Government to the point of not standing up for their God-given and Constitutional rights! Karl Marx knew that as long as the minds of the MAJORITY could be captured, his goal would gradually be met! History ignored is history repeated!

OK. I get it. The issues to be addressed are: (1) Why do so few get it? (2) What must be done to raise public awareness of the importance of States’ Rights?

My public school Civics classes, 68 years ago, failed to impress me with the importance of limited constitutional government. Bear in mind that my school was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Progressive FDR was serving his third term, before the end of WW II. Socialists had just begun writing the grade school text-books.

I have been doing a lot of growing up for the last ten years, thanks to people like Mr. Gottfried, Gary Kah (Hope for the World), Tom DeWeese (American Policy Center), Patrick Wood (GeoStrategicTrends), Phyllis Schlafly, Joan Veon, Martin Weiss (Money and Markets), Carl Teichrib (forcingchange.org). Now, how can I help get my country back on track? It appears we are about to lose most of what we had.

Fred007, What you see now happening to our country is likened to a man that buys a brand new home then doesn’t take care of it! He is enjoying life and having fun while termites get into his rafters.(Like the Marxist’s got into our governments infrastructure and our educational and banking systems)! As long as he can’t SEE the damage being done he continues to be complacent, apathetic and ignorant of the FACT that real damage IS taking place! Only until the rafters start giving way and the ceiling starts falling in does he take notice and become alarmed, alas much too late to save his house! As the damage to our country has reached a stage of near ravagement, the RED termites are coming boldly into the light for all those with intelligence to see! The PROBLEM is that the MAJORITY of Americans STILL can’t see them OR relate them to the damage they have created! As with the man and his ruined house, he would be best directed to demolish his home and rebuild from the ground up, but this time to be alert for termites entering! As with our Federal Government, we the people need to rebuild it from the ground up and this can only be done by the sovereign states whom first created it! If secession is neccessary than so be it!!!

Thanks Mr. Gotfried..well said..and some good commentary from the responders. Now how do we go about convincing the general public that it’s time to take back our rights. I’ve spoken to several folks about this and no-one seems to know which way to turn or what to do. I wrote my Congressman about this and so far haven’t got an answer from him. Do we need a million man march on Washington?…and why don’t our local politicians want to regain our soveriegnty? Is it because they keep getting chummed like fish from Washington? I’ve always thought we should shut down Washington D.C. as a central point of Government and make all our Politicians return to their home state where they can do the most good. I think the people need more local leaders to show them the way to get this started.

One of the most important elements of education to help insure and perpetuate our God-given freedoms is indepth study of World and American history! ONLY through learning of the errors of the past can we hope to not repeat them in the future! All one has to do is tune in to the Jay Leno show and watch one of his “Jay-walking” segments to see how lacking many of our youth AND their parents are in this area! Most of these people are intelligent and capable of knowledge BUT they are astute only in the areas of their interests! This is accentuated on by the major media and public educational system through the dilution and exclusion of critical information that would benefit society as a whole. Our fathers and forefathers who fought in wars past learned the hard way that freedom is not free! They passed this information on to their children but as time and peace comingled over several generations the evils of complacency, apathy and ignorance took a grip on posterity! With freedoms guards sound asleep, with the exception of the few that stayed alert, the MAJORITY of the American people were easily fooled by hollow words such as “change” without realizing it would be to their detriment ! It is a frailty of human nature that the majority must learn the HARD way while the minority must suffer with them! ONLY knowledge in history can break this ever-repeating, vicious cycle!

I have great reservations about your ability to pursuade the people to pursuade their State Legislators into taking back the definite responsibilities which have been usurped from them and which they have gladly given up despite what the Constitution says and what the Tenth Amendment delegated. Even now in this state of crisis.

The Liberty Amendment has been trying to convince the Federal Government to withdraw its tentacles from every facet of our lives since World War II without success until realizing that giving up power is not a common trait of man.

The movement then began to try to convince the State Legislators to demand a return of their powers and responsibilities. From 1959 to 1982 we had only nine State who realized the advantage of having the ratified Liberty Amendment, which restored the Constitution to its full power and effectiveness, with its limited and specific powers to the Federal Geovernment.

While Mr Ron Paul continued to try to rouse the Congress into even a recognition of the Liberty Amendment, we were busy since 2003 on the internet with (www.libertyamendment.org) trying to convince a multitude of the people to pursuade their State Legislators by E-mail, Snail mail, and otherwise, that they should request that the Liberty Amendment be submitted to the States for ratification before it was too late. We have had very limited success from 158,000 hits although the majority are during the last six months

Now the Tenth Amendment resolution by the States is about the same as the Liberty Amendment except it does not fix those unconstitutional powers and activities (85% of what they do) that are already being attempted by the Federal Government. What you need is the Tenth Amendment Resolution and a Resolution requesting the ratification of the Liberty Amendment by the States. This would be a fix, and the results would be fantastic.
Sincerely,

Please look up operation “Cable Splicer”. State and local government no longer has any power. They are marked for removal within six weeks of the declaration of martial law (and the removal is mortally fatal).